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Protecting the infrastructure of Europe and the people in the European smart cities

27 October 2017

(From ec.europa.eu)

Call summary and aims

Threats against crowded areas and disruptions in the operation of our countries' infrastructure may limit the liberties of our citizens and put at risk the functioning of our societies and their economies. The security and resilience of Europe critical infrastructure needs to be ensured because disruptions in their operations may entail the collapse of large sectors of our activities. Threats to soft targets such as crowded areas may have less long-term physical impact, but may be highly damaging due to potentially large numbers of victims and subsequent psychological and sociological impacts.

The topics below in this Call "Protecting the infrastructure in Europe" are part of the contribution of the Commission to the Cybersecurity contractual Public Private Partnership (cPPP), established in July 2016. This cPPP will facilitate the engagement of end-user operators in sectors that are important beneficiaries and customers of cybersecurity solutions towards defining and providing to the industry their sector-specific digital security, privacy and personal data protection common requirements.

When a topic has eligibility and admissibility conditions which require the active involvement of specific entities (e.g.: operators), this means that these entities have to be participants and should be directly involved in the carrying out of the tasks foreseen in the grant. When a reference is made to "practitioners", the text refers to someone who is qualified or registered to practice a particular occupation, profession in the field of security or civil protection. Applicants should identify clearly which members of the consortium they consider "practitioners" in the specific context of their proposal, and to include a clear description of their respective role and added-value as practitioners in section 4.3 of proposal part B4-6.

Whereas activities will have an exclusive focus on civil applications, coordination with the activities of the European Defence Agency (EDA) may be considered with possible synergies being established with projects funded by the EDA programmes[[http://eda.europa.eu/what-we-do/eda-priorities/research-technology]]. The complementarity of such synergies should be described comprehensively. On-going cooperation should be taken into account. Only an explicit and firm commitment from EDA-funded projects to contribute to a project may positively impact the evaluation of a proposal submitted under this work programme part.

In this Call, "standards" and "standardisation" are used in a broad sense, except where they are specifically referred to as "European standards" or "European standardisation".

All topics in this work programme part will be subject to security scrutiny.

The aim of this Call is to protect and improve the resilience of critical infrastructures and soft targets.

The Commission reserves the possibility under this call to exclude a specific project from the delegation to the REA if it appears that that project would necessarily have a close link to the development of EU policies in the field of security.